Their Eyes Were Watching God Resources

Movie or TV Productions

Audios

A dedicated anthropologist, Hurston worked for the WPA Federal Writer’s Project to record black folklore, music, and rituals in Florida during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Library of Congress website has a full archive of the sound recordings Hurston and the other anthropologists collected during their time in Florida.

Other

Before Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, she created a collection of folklore gathered from her research of black cultural life in Eatonville. That collection later became the book Mules and Men. Several of the folktales in the book can open new ways of understanding the folklore in Their Eyes, especially “Witness of the Johnstown Flood in Heaven.”